The Cue Card

I’ve been up to my ears in moonshine so to speak. I just finished Matt Bondurant’s 2008 historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” about the bootlegging that went on in Franklin County Virginia during Prohibition and then I saw the new movie adapted from it called “Lawless.”

Although the movie is decent, the book, as usual, is far superior. It’s a story about three brothers (actually the author’s own grandfather and great-uncles) who illegally ran moonshine stills and distributed “white lightning” under the cover of their filling station. It was apart of the ’20s and early ’30s when moonshine activity exploded in the poor Virginia county amid the Blue Ridge foothills. “The Bondurant Boys,” as they were known, were like many of the residents there involved in the illegal liquor trade. The Bondurants came up against law officers who covertly demanded their cut of the bootlegging profits. What happened in real life was a bloody showdown.

“Wettest County” is a novel based on that true story, which the author pieced together from news articles and filled in the gaps with his imagination. His grandfather never talked about his moonshine involvement other than to confirm he had once been shot. The rest the author dug up and turned into a vivid and resonant account.

The descriptions and atmosphere are right out of Prohibition- and Depression-era times. It’s direct and often violent, comparable to some of Cormac McCarthy’s writings but perhaps with more hope and less darkness. The brothers overcome various harsh realities, including the early loss of their mother and two sisters in the flu epidemic, and the night the head brother, Forrest, is left for dead with his throat cut open by two rival goons.

The story is exceptional and well written, but the novel isn’t totally easy. Most of it’s from Jack, the youngest brother’s point of view, but one thread conjures Sherwood Anderson, the author, who covered the resulting bootlegging trial. It jumps in time back and forth from 1935 to earlier. It gets a bit confusing or distracting a few times and I lost some steam in my reading about half way through, wishing parts might be a bit shorter. But still I took away from it an interesting dose of moonshine history and a story forever etched in my memory. I’d be interested to check out Matt Bondurant’s latest novel “The Night Swimmer” as he seems quite a writer to watch.

As for the movie “Lawless,” prepare yourself for some uncomfortable violence. For me, the screenplay was missing some of the essence of the novel. It’s too bad because the cast is quite good, albeit the foothill dialect meandered a bit. It’s still pretty decent and might not be too far off from other such attempts at novels like “All the Pretty Horses” or “Cold Mountain” that were moved to the silver screen. Lyrical books are just hard to match in movieland.

Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing” is a bit of a creepy little novel about a woman who returns to her hometown in Quebec to look for her missing father. She brings her boyfriend along and a married couple who accompany her to her family’s old cabin on a remote, woodsy island. But with her father disappeared and her mother deceased, all that’s there are her childhood memories, which seem to overtake her. It’s while she’s staying on the island to look for him that her mind begins to unravel.

Check out the book’s cover; doesn’t it make you feel a bit uneasy? In that respect, it slightly reminded me of Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island” from 2003. But “Surfacing” was published 40 years ago in 1972, and has a lot of themes going on in it from that era, particularly Quebec’s separatist movement, Canadian nationalism, feminism, and environmentalism. The main character feels alienated by social pressures that she play a particular role because of her gender – which makes her respond by withdrawing.

“Surfacing” feels like it’s from the late ’60s – the four characters are hippy-ish — but still the novel seems quite potent today. Partly that’s because Margaret Atwood is a master who doesn’t mess around getting her themes across, but also it’s because these themes still linger. I had to grin a bit when the character David wants to drive the “fascist pig Yanks” out of Canada. The American “infiltration” up North is still a real sore point among quite a few.

I liked the novel as I felt as if I were on the island with the four characters – one of which is a chauvinist jerk — and there’s an ominous feeling that something eerie is going to happen. It’s quite tangible but towards the end, I did have to read some passages a few times over to make sense of what is going on. It gets quite loopy and is not totally easy to understand in places. But the writing is quite lyrical and otherworldly.

This is my third novel that I’ve read by Margaret Atwood, who I think is such a unique and powerful writer. “Alias Grace” is perhaps my favorite, but this one isn’t shabby either. I plan to keep reading Atwood and other Canadian authors because I live in Canada now – and want to familiarize myself with the great fiction of this vast and wonderful country.

I made this trek and I’m glad that I did. Not the Pacific Crest Trail that Cheryl Strayed hiked 1,100 miles from the Mojave Desert through Oregon doing but her memoir about her long walk in the summer of ’95. There’s plenty in “Wild” that might rile you: particularly how crazy it is to attempt such a journey so ill-prepared and by yourself at age 26. Wouldn’t you practice or get in shape first? Take a test-run, a buddy, and enough money? Know what you’re doing? I had to roll my eyes at the beginning: it seemed pretty dumb if not totally dangerous. She is in agony most of the time from boots that don’t fit and toenails that fall off and pockets short of coin.

But people that are lost and youthful don’t always make the wisest of choices. She acknowledges her “idiocy” at the journey’s beginning. But before going, Cheryl had been dealt a heavy blow with her mom dying at 45 of cancer that left her reeling. Her siblings scattered as did her stepfather. She was using drugs, fooling around on a husband she cared about and going nowhere under a heavy maze of grief. After seeing a book about the Pacific Crest Trail (which goes from Mexico to Canada), she gets the idea to hike a good portion of it in hopes that it will turn her life around. And so her journey begins.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a sucker for healing-seeking, journey-type stories and devoured Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” about a 24-year-old’s attempt to live in the wilds of Alaska. Fortunately, Cheryl’s trek has a much happier outcome. The trail works its magic on her through all the pain, endless miles and solitude of walking in the wilderness alone. She does befriend quite a few fellow PCT hikers along the way and has various adventures, coming upon rattle snakes, bears, a migration of frogs, and non-PCT folks who are most often a bit weird but friendly.

Cheryl tells of her trek rather open and straightforwardly, often unsparingly of herself. “Wild” is not as gripping as Krakauer’s books, but it did keep me reading and thinking about it, as if I were traveling alongside her on the trail. I felt for Cheryl over the sadness of her divorce and mostly her mother’s death, which is palpable and enormous in the book. I wanted her to find solace. And indeed she seems to grow stronger and more courageous as she moves forward along the PCT.

There’s some good passages in the book, a few profound about her life growing up and her mother and family and being on the trail day and night and the hardships life throws you. I might not always agree with her choices but she comes across most often heartfelt, likable and a bit irreverent.

One thing that sort of made me hesitate about “Wild” is that it was published over 15 years after she did the trail, apparently from journals and such. Maybe that holds back some of the vividness or action in parts of the book. It’s a bit amazing she can piece together all of the conversations from back then. But despite whatever flaws, “Wild” still hits a human chord that leaves a pretty deep impression. And it might just leave you wanting to do the PCT yourself.

I first heard about Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Once Upon a River” from Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, who put it on his best of 2011 list. And now I know why. I was thoroughly absorbed by this novel set in the early 1980s about a 16-year-old girl who, after her mother splits and her father’s violent death, takes to the river of her rural Michigan town in a rowboat to try and find her mom and in the process begins to forge a new life.

Rural, impoverished river life is not exactly the safest place for a pretty girl, and she happens upon some unsavory characters along the way. Luckily Margo Crane is no ordinary girl; she’s quite the survivalist, who can shoot like a sharpshooter (Annie Oakley is her hero), skin and cook wild game and fish, and sleep for weeks in the great outdoors. She’s a throwback, who prefers being in the natural world on the river with her gun and a dog to school or what other kids are into it.

It’s a rough existence though, and impending hardships and violence seem to lurk around each bend. You might slightly think of the river adventures of Huck Finn crossed with those of “Deliverance” perhaps. But Margo Crane also reminds me of one of those great female characters like the tomboyish Scout in “To Kill a Mocking Bird.” She’s that good and able.

Best of all, is author Bonnie Jo Campbell’s writing, which so seamlessly conjures the natural world of the area and sucks one into the story before you know it. It flows so naturally like the river, and I was turning pages pretty lickety-split to find out what happens to Margo. Will she find peace and a home on the river? Will she go back to her mother? Will she find a way to live that she so desires? These are some of the quandaries that are partly resolved at the end.

“Once Upon a River” is a pretty hypnotic read. It might not be for everyone due to some violence or its backwoods environment and cast, where hunting and skinning wild game is a means to get by, but I would have to say it’s my favorite read so far in 2012. Bonnie Jo Campbell is a writer to watch; she’s already been a National Book Award finalist with her short story collection “American Salvage,” which I intend to read in the future, or anything else she happens to write next.